New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio became the first 2020 Democratic presidential candidate to confront Joe Biden over his comments lauding ability to work with Southern segregationists.
“It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal & that whites were entitled to ‘the pursuit of dead n*ggers,’ de Blasio wrote on Twitter Wednesday. “It’s past time for apologies or evolution from @JoeBiden. He repeatedly demonstrates that he is out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party.”
De Blasio, whose wife Chirlane McCray is black, was responding to Biden’s comments at a New York fundraiser Tuesday evening in which he boasted of his ability to work with segregationist fellow Democratic Sens. James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia.
“I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,” Biden, 76, said, according to a pool report, impersonating a Southerner’s drawl. “He never called me boy, he always called me son.”
Immediately afterwards, Biden reflected on his work with Talmadge, who he called “one of the meanest guys I ever knew.”
“Well, guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done. We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished,” Biden added. “But today, you look at the other side, and you’re the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don’t talk to each other anymore.”
Eastland, who died in 1986 aged 81, said many times that black people were part of “an inferior race.” When later asked if he would change anything in his political career, he said he had “voted my convictions on everything.”
Talmadge, who died in 2002 at 88, once denounced the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation, saying ”there aren’t enough troops in the whole United States to make the white people of this state send their children to school with colored children.”
He described civil rights legislation as “sanctions aimed at the white Southerner” and derided Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota’s battle against segregation, saying: “It’s easy to pontificate on race relations when your biggest ethnic minority is Swedes.”
Biden caucused with Eastland and Talmadge when he began his 36-year stint in the Senate in 1973. He was then aged 30 and joined a chamber of 99 white men and one black man, Sen. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, a Republican.
